Guv Jerry Brown’s peeps like to talk about how he’s laser-focused on Sacramento in his Jerry 2.0 incarnation. No presidential runs. Rarely does national media. Keeps the Latin drops to a minimum. Swallows the more ethereal Jerryisms. The state’s a mess, as you know, and more pressing, he’s got Prop 30 to pass.

But politics and governing aside, this new, more somber Jerry is….well…often a bit dull.

And then comes this takeout from the November issue of Esquire magazine, which when last we checked does not have a Modoc bureau.

Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. Just in time for the November holidays comes a Thanksgiving buffet of Jerryisms. If we had spent time in the seminary like Jerry rather than being frog-marched to Sunday school, we’d drop some Latin here to express our joy.

Jerry Brown

Governor Jerry Brown: Dull or hard working?

Instead, we’ll turn the mic over to a mere sampling of this highly-entertaining trip through our governor’s mind, courtesy of Esquire, which crafted the piece as a related string of quotes… which we are taking out of order for our own amusement:

I have a cherry tree right below my deck at home. In the spring, the cherry tree has these beautiful white blossoms. Then cherries appear. Then everything falls off and the limbs have a whitish appearance. It looks like the tree is dead. But I know in a few months the blossoms will come again. And I find it somewhat encouraging that there is renewal amidst all this other stuff we’re encountering in the political realm.

There is this notion captured by the phrase tantum quantum in Latin. What that stands for is: So much, how much. So much you need, that’s how much you should get. That’s the principle. I’m not saying I come close to that. But it’s an ideal.

Our system of economy doesn’t work that way. The notion of capitalism is the endless creation of new needs and desires. Then the fulfillment of those needs and desires by a proliferation of novelties, commodities, and new services. So the whole system depends on the opposite of tantum quantum. Now, how long and how stable that system is, that’s another question.

I can remember the day. August 14, 1956. That’s when I entered Sacred Heart Novitiate. It’s primarily a life of silence, meditation, prayer, and study, with some servile labor mixed in. When I got there, I had my first experience with what was called magnum silencium. The great silence. It gave me a pit in my stomach. It was almost a physical pain not to talk. But you get used to it after a while. And then it goes away.

You’ve gotta brush your teeth every day. You’ve gotta take in the laundry. You’ve gotta put food on the table. In the collective life, though, we’re always fixing something and doing something. And I would say we’re making a lot of progress. We just put a vehicle on Mars. Pretty amazing to put a one-ton vehicle on another planet. It was built in California by mostly Californians.

Bonus: Brown’s “What I learned feature” interview is paired with one starring NJ Guv Chris Christie — who has became the object of Brown’s thinly-veiled fat jokes after Christie called Brown a “retread.”